Greg wrote (concerning linuxcookbook):

Lotsa good info there.

But sadly unmaintained, so a good portion of the information in it is pretty outdated. Copyright notice's date is 2001, but a lot of the contents are 1995 state-of-the-art. Lots of URLs of defunct sites (TheDukeOfURL, Maxwell word processor, ftp.cdrom.com, lhd.datapower.com, the extant-but-now-useless linux.com site, linuxdoc.org), telnet tutorial with no mention of SSH (though telnet with kerberos4 is covered), GNU "info" tutorial with no mention of less-wretched alternatives like tkinfo, MS-Word .doc conversion with word2x but not wvWare. The coverage of fonts is almost completely obsolete. It mentions the patent problem with MP3, but says nothing about Vorbis or the Ogg format. The filesystems section has nothing about journaling. The section on printing covers only Berkeley lpr. The section on Internet dialup covers the primordial "ppp" program but nothing else.

And there are those strange old-fogie blind spots, like the total absence of any mention of database applications. I'm sympathetic to the Unixey prejudice for flat files up to a point, but c'mon.

All that having been said, it's not only a good collection of information, but also a very clear, well written tutorial for basic Unix tools and fundamental problems of Linux operations -- valuable as long as you remember that it's a bit shy on the last decade's improvements. I intend to actually sit down and work through the thing from end to end, in order to fill in some of the gaps in my own rather haphazard knowledge. The chapters on text-file handling alone are golden.

Except, of course, the Emacs chapter, which I'll skip for religious reasons. ;->

Which reminds me: Stutz commits the common error of (strongly) implying that XEmacs differs from GNU Emacs in adding X11 support, which of course the two versions both have.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com